Xander’s been moving about more frequently and vigorously the past week or so. ‘Tis the month of turning down, as our gynae and about a hundred pregnancy books and articles say, so my wife is also in the process of packing her overnight bag for the hospital stay when she is ready to deliver.

(I am finding pregnancy terms increasingly disturbing. like “ready to deliver.” When we first went to see our gynae, she had to leave in the middle of our consultation to “take a delivery”. Being the only man in the entire clinic at the moment, I thought maybe some pharmaceutical company were replenishing some stock or something, but nooooooo, it was a baby she had to take delivery of! That’s right up there in the list of “They Got To Find a Better Way Of Saying That” phrases, together with “expressing milk” for me.)

Many nights, we’ve been marvelling at Xander’s movements. My wife describes him as large enough to stretch himself from her left side to her right side (which is a bit of a stretch for me to believe, but who am I to talk? She’s the one who’s pregnant). When she invites me to put my hands on her belly though, I get what she’s saying. Xander’s either playing out the Contra secret code for 99 lives (the ever immortal up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-A-B-Select-Start) with his legs, or my wife installed a foetal Dance Dance Revolution wombpad for Xander’s turn-of-the-millenium Ah Beng education.

Whatever he’s doing, it’s evident he’s running out of space in his mother’s not-very-little tum-tum. My wife is starting to walk the exact way she doesn’t want to; like a penguin. And the labour pains are constant; our bout of food poisoning seems like a primer for what is to inevitably come for the tail end of my wife’s hotly anticipated third trimester; Braxton-Hicks coupled with a few solid foetal kicks (I was hoping he’d get into basketball instead, but whatever keeps him fit, yeah?).

In the last 48 hours since I’ve been afflicted, I’ve lost over 3kg. If this goes on, I’ll be back to my old army physique in a month (oops, I think I just gave out how much weight I’m supposed to lose).

The doctor also told me yesterday, I am suffering from food poisoning not amounting to diarrhoea. I thought he was reading me a criminal charge, like “negligent act not amounting to culpable homicide”, or “culpable homicide not amounting to murder”, or something; I felt just as guilty when I called the office to report my medical leave.

I’m not the only one who got poisoned though; my wife’s got the runs as well. She’s been running to the toilet about 5 or 6 times each day for the last two days as well. While this would be quite worrying for any parent-to-be, through our dear friend Google and our trusted gynaecologist whom we paid a visit to yesterday, we were told as long as there’s no fever and no bleeding, my wife is free to run as many times as she wants without harming the baby, as long as she doesn’t mind the pain and inconvenience that comes with it, which she does, so we’re gonna try not doing it too often.

But we’re not the only ones either! Apparently there are 2 people in our office that have also been food-poisoned. While one (who was celebrating Deepavali last week, thus will probably have a lot of curry wreaking havoc in her system) is understandable, the other would make 4 people in the office who have eaten something wrong at some point over the weekend. This might seem too much of a coincidence to anyone who’s watched enough TV (i.e., too much CSI/X-Files and the Final Destination Trilogy).

Is it something we all ate at some point in the office? Or did we all go to the same hawker centre next to the Esplanade over the weekend and ordered the same fried oyster for dinner? Or were we all poisoned by Chinese food manufacturers?

Regardless the conspiracy, good things have come out of this little debacle. For one, I lost over 3kg. I’ve also got to spend a little more personal time with my wife and our about-to-be-born son (even though I was delirious with fever half the time) and we even got to watch the Coffin (against both our parents’ advice for horror content, and our friends’ advice for its low rating), which isn’t really scary… unless you know for a fact how these Thai coffin rituals are really performed (again, another story for another post).

Update:

Looks like my China conspiracy theory isn’t too far off. I was drinking a pack of Vitasoy honeydew-flavoured milk when I realised my wife was drinking a pack the night she got her diarrhoea ( I realise diarrhoea may not be an immediate symptom of melamine poisoning, but then who knows anything for sure?). After doing a search on Vitasoy and melamine, checking out the AVA melamine-tainted product list and subsequently looking through our pantry, we realised this China food crisis has hit closer to home than we so wrongly assumed. We’ve had to throw out some biscuits and other (already expired anyway) items, as well as the rest of our Vitasoy stock, though the warnings against the Vitasoy Honeydew-flavoured Soy Milk seems suspiciously hoax-ish. Oh well.